Batman Live – review

Batman emerges to delight the audience, young and old. Photograph: MEN Arena

Imagine a grey, post-industrial urban landscape festering with decadence and crime, where the only sounds are the shriek of sirens and the occasional gunshot. But this is not the BBC's new headquarters in the north: this is Gotham City.

Or, to be more precise, the apocalyptic chaos of Gotham City by way of the Manchester Evening News Arena, where the world premiere of the all-screaming, all-tumbling, £12m Batman Live stage show erupted.

Before the curtain went up, the arena foyer was thronged with hordes of miniature bat–fans who had come to see the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder do battle with a frankly unfair quantity of foes, among them the Joker, the Riddler, Catwoman, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, and even Poison Ivy.

But first there was the merchandise to be snapped up: bat capes, bat T-shirts, bat masks, bat hoodies, and even, for the fashion-conscious-yet-practical feline villain about town, Catwoman shopping bags.

Fathers who obliged offspring (or perhaps merely themselves) by donning capes or caking their faces in full Joker makeup were rewarded with a two-hour extravaganza carefully crafted to delight small boys and raise frequent smiles and cheers from the grown-ups.

"I feel excited," said one mum as she and her bat-son took their seats.

"I feel more than excited," he replied.

Fortunately for its young audience, Batman Live has more in common with the comics and Tim Burton films than graphic novels and Christopher Nolan movies. Despite a huge set that presents Gotham as a hellish metropolis, jagged and malevolent of skyline, and dirty and dark of street, the production has, for the most part, reined in the more unpalatable aspects of sociopathic vigilantism. And so the figure who strutted across the vast stage was a sanitised Batman, a crimefighter who prizes justice over revenge; a Dark Knight rendered a paler shade of black.

There was, however, still plenty to thrill and chill the audience.

Where else would a lively circus trapeze act find itself bookended by the murders of pères Batman and Robin?

Or a hi-tech sweep around the subterranean depths of the bat cave be followed by nightmarish visit to Arkham Asylum, where the Scarecrow holds court and the strait-jacketed inmates hang, on chains, from the ceiling?

And that's to say nothing of the flirty, leather-clad Catwoman who embraces our rubber-costumed hero in Gotham's museum of modern art while panting like a moggie in a microwave. And the Penguin chews the scenery as if coated in pilchard paste and quacks "Penguins mate for life" into Catwoman's ear.

The real star of the show, though, is the enormous, 100ft-wide, bat-shaped LED video wall that moves the action from setpiece to setpiece with a gigantic shuffle of electronic comic book pages.

Others disagreed. For 10-year-old James Nicholson from Bury, it was unquestionably the all-new Batmobile – a study in stealthy, rocket-propelled F1 styling. Was he not, like his big sister Shannon, more taken by the clinch between Batman and Catwoman?

"No, I liked the car."

He was not the only one bewitched. The biggest cheer of the night rang out when the Dark Knight introduced himself. "I'm Batman," he bellowed to the arena. "Yeah!" screamed back a voice that could only belong to a man in his mid-30s. And the bat-fans roared their approval.